Experiencing performance related issues in Lightroom 3.x

[laurencec]

Hi

I just upgraded from lightroom 2.7 to lightroom 3. I then proceeded to import my old catalog. this all went fine but lightroom is so slow, the thumbnail previews take forever to load if I manage to have the patience to wait  for them.

is there a quick solution?? How can it be sped up?

thanks

Laurence

Message title was edited by: Brett N

[john beardsworth]

imajez wrote:

No different than your lack of appreciation for Virtual copies ... to some folks they are quite important ....

I do not lack appreciation for VCs. I just won't use them again until I can save them in metadata, just I can with snapshots. I lost a lot of VCs when a catalogue went squiffy and back ups can only be done so often, without eating into your time.

Look up a plug-in called Snapshotter.

[imajez]

johnbeardy wrote:

Look up a plug-in called Snapshotter.

Downloaded and installed. Potentially useful new plugin. Thanks John.

Wondering about how or whether to incorporate it it into my workflow.

Minimising errors or loss of work is my main goal.

[Butch_M]

imajez wrote:

I lost a lot of VCs when a catalogue went squiffy and back ups can only be done so often, without eating into your time.

Like I said ... there is no perfect failsafe .... for me ... the auto write to XMP does eat into my time ....

I fell off my bicycle once and broke my arm ... should I have never taken the training wheels off? Or should I have learned to ride better and more safely? I chose to do the latter. All with the knowledge that someday, it would be possible to experience another fall ... but trusted my ability to become a better rider.

I don't disagree with your opinion ... I only choose to reach my goal in a different manner and have the tolerance to accept your viewpoint ... for you it works ... but even using your method is no guarantee that all will end well if calamity strikes ...

I never said you were wrong ... I simply choose a different avenue to travel to the same end result and trust myself to be diligent in my workflow ... I don't feel my choice of implementation is wrong .... just different ...

[imajez]

Butch_M wrote:

I never said you were wrong ... I simply choose a different avenue to travel to the same end result and trust myself to be diligent in my workflow ... I don't feel my choice of implementation is wrong .... just different ...

Likewise.

But I feel your method is far more risky and why I do not use it and I would have lost work on more than one occasion if I had used your methodology, due to crashes, power failures etc.You have to be extremely diligent and never ever make mistakes/forget or let any outside factors come into play. Being human and using software designed by other flawed humans, I choose auto save!  And I always recommend against manual saving to other humans as well.

Not to mention that I also use Br, so it would be even more of a faff and would more likely lead to more mistakes and time lost..

[J_Simono]

Oh man, I am building a similar pc right now for LR3.  I was looking forward to this, a new machine and LR3.  Guess I am going to stick with 2.7.

I did not get a warm and fuzzy feeling from the development phase that they (Adobe) was on top of the performance improvements that photographers expected.  A 4ghz i7 with 12gb of ram should slice through raws like butter.

Where's Abobe?  Why have they not said anything?  "Hello, we are working on it" would go a long way, geesh.

[areohbee]

J.Simono wrote:

Where's Abobe?  Why have they not said anything?  "Hello, we are working on it" would go a long way, geesh.

Although I agree that a better system of communication in the direction of "Adobe -> Users" would be a good thing. If you read around a little more you'll see that Adobe is aware of most of the performance problems and is actively working on them.

Rob

[Guest]

For what it's worth:

I have an i5-750 Windows PC with a nVidia GeForce 250 GTS graphics card installed. The OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and RAM is 4 GB. My 12 mp RAW files from Panasonic GH1 render almost instantaneously. LR3 performs better than LR2 in my case.

I guess there are many factors which you need to consider. In my case, I have only the default Microsoft drivers (WDDM v 1.1) installed, no special stuff downloaded from nVidia.

With my previous Intel E 6600 PC with Windows 7 32-bit and 2 GB RAM, I discovered sometime after purchase, that this machine had some drawbacks. While some components where pretty good speced (Graphics Card, CPU) some reviews noted that the mainboard wasn't so great (the vendor apparently saved on that), having certain throughput bottlenecks, from which especially disc access and other speed related stuff suffered.

So, even if someone claims to have a well speced machine, chances are, that not all components where so well selected by the manufacturer (especially the one, which you cannot advertise with shiny numbers) and unfortunately one bottleneck could slow the things down enough. Adobe does not have influence on many of these parameters.

I have to admit, that I do not have 20+ mpx raw files at hand, but I would expect that image rendering would only slow down relatively.

Kind regards

Thomas

[arnelg]

Rob,

Would you kindly send a link relating to this thread or any thread about LR 3's slowness that an Adobe employee has said anything and actively working on them.  Apparently, this thread has continued so long, and I might have missed it.

Arnel

[areohbee]

arnelg,

Becky Sowada (+becs), Melissa Gaul (MelissaJ.G), and Julie Kmoch are the responders that I can think of off the top of my head.

If you look you'll find them, albeit very "sparingly".

Try advanced search.

PS - If you use the quote tool it'll save you from having to take png shots.

Rob

[imajez]

areohbee wrote:

arnelg,

Becky Sowada (+becs), Melissa Gaul (MelissaJ.G), and Julie Kmoch are the responders that I can think of off the top of my head.

If you look you'll find them, albeit very "sparingly".

Yet if Adobe engineers answered every post on the forums, people would then complain that they weren't spending time fixing LR

[Guest]

24" Imac, 2.66gz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM, OS 10.5.7. No Internet security software running.  Upgraded to LR 3 from last version of Lightroom 2.

LR3 is miserable on my system, even with all other programs closed. RAM regularly maxes out and the system becomes unresponsive. The program is useless to me. The minimum spec is supposed to be 2 GB of RAM, but that seems ridiculous considering the awful performance I am getting on a relatively recent machine with 4GB of RAM.  Will more RAM solve my problem with my equipment? If so, it would have been nice to know this before buying the upgrade. I might not have bought it, or is that exactly what Adobe was thinking?

[Butch_M]

2010DME wrote:

Will more RAM solve my problem with my equipment? If so, it would have been nice to know this before buying the upgrade. I might not have bought it, or is that exactly what Adobe was thinking?

No, I really don't think it is a RAM issue ... I use a 24" iMac 2.16 Ghz Core2Duo with only 3MB RAM (that's the max it can recognize) and have no issues with LR3 ... it seems it has been quite tricky to find the source of the problem.

Try running repair permissions on your startup drive, expanding the Camera Raw Cache in LR3 preferences, optimize your catalog and finally run a new calibration for your monitor to create a new monitor profile.

Some of these steps have helped some users ... and not helped others.

If you run these steps ... be sure to report back your results so the LR Team is aware ....

[kwdaves-WfiRTh]

I finally gave in and completely regenerated the standard previews after first deleting everything in the LR3  previews folder. It took close to 10 hours to generate the previews and I optimized the catalog lastly. It was worth the time spent.  LR3 now performs at close to the speed of LR2 (no speedster itself).

[Guest]

2.4 GHz imac

10.5.8

300G HDD

3G ram.

I eventually got it running in 32 bit (64 bit crashes my machine and so does 2.7 when run in 64 bit- other thread on this forum).

However, I also find it painfully slow - about 2 sec to load an image & sometimes I have had to exit and come back in for it to load a particular catalogue.

How can I meter cpu usage - I gather there is a display but I am not sure where.

However, I find that stacks work better here than in 2.7 (a minor point - they never worked well in 2.7)

[JimHess-8IPblY]

I have decided that if your machine is slow, it is going to be slow.  Adobe will advise you to purge the cache, update your video driver, put your cache on a different hard drive, and a bunch of other ideas.  I am running Lightroom on two different computers, similar specifications.  On one computer I experience similar lag as has been described here.  On the other, changes are almost instantaneous.  Adobe doesn't seem to have any real solutions.

Windows XP
4 GB RAM
3 GHz processor
Same Video Driver

I have tried all of the suggestions.  I even increased the size of my cache.  No difference.  One machine is slow, the other isn't.

[BSC_PHOTO]

There is a lot of arguing over samantics but the truth is LR 3 is wicked slow and has too many bugs for my tatse. Saying that you get better IQ doesn't make sense to me either. At what point is the IQ better? I found that after applying a preset or any adjustment for that matter the preview goes soft and it takes zooming in then out to get a crisp view again.

I run relatively small catalogs too, I have one for each event so I'm usually under 2000 images per catalog.

iMac 3.33ghz - 12GB RAM - snow leopard

[areohbee]

BSC_PHOTO wrote:

There is a lot of arguing over samantics but the truth is LR 3 is wicked slow and has too many bugs for my tatse.

- Lightroom 3.0 has plenty of bugs to be sure. But a lot of the slowness is due to the bugs. When Lightroom 3 is working properly, and for some people it is, Lightroom 3 is, in general, a little peppier than Lightroom 2 was.

BSC_PHOTO wrote:

Saying that you get better IQ doesn't make sense to me either.

- Compare to Bibble 5.1, DxO 6, CaptureOnePro5, NX2, and Aperture 3.

BSC_PHOTO wrote:

I found that after applying a preset or any adjustment for that matter the preview goes soft and it takes zooming in then out to get a crisp view again.

- Thats a bug. Adjustments are quick for me on a modest win7/64 machine.

Rob

[BSC_PHOTO]

"- Compare to Bibble 5.1, DxO 6, CaptureOnePro5, NX2, and Aperture 3."

Never used them. I thought "better IQ" meant better than LR2

How do some of us have bugs and other don't? I never got that.

I do find that images from my lower megapixel cameras render at normal speeds while my larger MP images used to render an "normal" speeds.

It is just frustrating.

[areohbee]

BSC_PHOTO wrote:

"- Compare to Bibble 5.1, DxO 6, CaptureOnePro5, NX2, and Aperture 3."

Never used them. I thought "better IQ" meant better than LR2

- I should have said "Compare to Bibble 5.1, DxO 6, CaptureOnePro5, NX2, Aperture 3, and Lightroom 2" .

BSC_PHOTO wrote:

How do some of us have bugs and other don't? I never got that.

- If its any consolation - Adobe is struggling with the very same question.

BSC_PHOTO wrote:

It is just frustrating.

- Indeed.

Rob

[FeatherLightStudios]

Everyone - Wonder if it has something to do with NVIDIA driver configuration - For what it's worth - Here's my configuration -

Dell XPS 630 Quad Core Q9550, Windows 7, 64-bit Home Premium, two NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT cards running in SLI configuration. Running latest drivers from NVIDIA website.  8GB RAM  5.9 User experience.  Two 500GB 7200 RPM drives in RAID 0 configuration.

Also confirmed disk has 0 fragmentation, running Kaspersky 2010 Internet sercurity (LR3 runs just as slow with this disabled)

I'll give Adobe a call tomorrow and see if talking to someone on the phone generates an answer - If they figure it out, I'll post here!

-David

[n781lc]

Please, I'm not starting the OS argument - I use and like both, different roles. .  It has been my experience that due to the variations in the equipment of the Windows machines  (Including my own builds) the results differ.  The Macs are store bought and so pretty much the same (within the Chinese tolerance limits).

My point is  >> could the "bugs" be resulting from the equipment?  .. if stupid question please forgive. I am an intermediate LR user since 1.0 but have not had the experiences or experience of most of you on line.  3 has provided me with a better experience and have seen little difference in speed oralthough definitely more memory usage.   iMac 3.06 Ghz, 4 G Ram 1067 Mhz.  iPad 32G as Tutorial and Guide monitor. (and tethered image viewer some of the time).

Ed

[Lou_Gonza]

I agree with the 64 bit memory leak theory. I posted about this yesterday. See here. I have 8 gb of RAM and it ate 6.78gb while importing 264 raw files! Are you kidding me? Something is definitely wrong.

I'm gonna try loading the 32 bit version on my 64 bit PC, and see if that helps.

[Eric_G_7D]

I agree - I was one of the previous posters, and I just installed 32-bit LR3. It's considerably faster to render Library previews (even in Grid Mode with small thumbnails) and is using a lot less memory.

The issue does seem to be large CR2 (raw) files, but with my setup (fast 6-core processor and 12 GB DDR3 memory, etc.), I'd expect reasonable performance even with large files.

Adobe - can you help?

[Lou_Gonza]

Yes, I'm importing Canon 5dM2 raw files (25-30mb each!) and LR3 is choking on them. There is no doubt, they are BIG files, but I would still expect LR to be able to handle them. It is being marketed as pro software so one would expect them to have tested this.

I love Lightroom. But it always mystifies me when users right off the bat catch things like this but Adobe (or any software company for that matter) for some reason didn't see this in testing before it was released. It just blows my mind. Go figure.

[arnelg]

Lou, I agree. In my experience, Lightroom 2.7 does not choke importing 5D Mk II files. And Lr 3 is supposed to be an upgrade.